Dev team, please fix the healer role

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Wait giving healers more damage abilities makes them unfun to play?

Not the person you replied, but no.

It’s more of a proficiency issue than anything else. Bad healers makes bad decisions no matter how well/badly designed the job is.

I.e. Medica II as their first line of defense in lv90 content; not reading their tooltip; misjudging the amount of health required to survive next raidwide; simply choosing not to dps when nothing’s happening; simply forgetting to heal; or for whatever reason chooses not to heal.

The list goes on.

[ThorneDynasty]

People still use "I saw a damage GCD when party was dying" as a proof of bad green-DPS play? GCD heals are usually not the best crisis managment tool. Let alone hardcasting raise, you can't just sit there doing nothing for 8 seconds if the rest of the party is also about to die as described. You only do that if you are certain the next mechanic absolutely needs the bodies, and it's usually a hail mary at that point.

[Rilifane]

I don’t know what kind of healers you have ran with, but I have seen plenty of healers refuse to raise or refuse to shield/heal players in danger. Instead spamming their 1 damage abilities sometimes until they die/raid wipe.

This may be really shocking but... bad players exist.
And what's even more shocking: they are allowed to chose the green role thus resulting in a bad player playing a healer. It's almost as if every role and class can have bad players.

A bad player will be bad regardless how you design the toolkit.
A bad player spams 4 Medica II back to back, runs out of MP and then complains that he doesn't have MP because he was "solo healing".
A bad player tries to hardraise someone 3 times in a row and always get interrupted by mechanics last second while people around them keep dying because they were busy doing nothing for 6s and then get interrupted.
A bad player panics and pushes random buttons when things go sideways.
A bad player zones out and forget to pay attention to party HP.
A bad player misjudges party HP.
The list of signs of a bad player is long.

These people don't actively refuse to heal to chase a parse in Bardam's and would rather let the group wipe over and over instead of healing just once to get on with their life, they are simply bad players that have absolutely no overview of the situation, constantly misjudge, misuse their toolkit and zone out at the worst times. That has nothing to do with the amount of dps buttons.

[D6Damager]

A bad player will be bad regardless how you design the toolkit.
A bad player spams 4 Medica II back to back, runs out of MP and then complains that he doesn't have MP because he was "solo healing".
A bad player tries to hardraise someone 3 times in a row and always get interrupted by mechanics last second while people around them keep dying because they were busy doing nothing for 6s and then get interrupted.
A bad player panics and pushes random buttons when things go sideways.
A bad player zones out and forget to pay attention to party HP.
A bad player misjudges party HP.
The list of signs of a bad player is long.

It's funny how people say healers aren't engaging...and then you get a post like this actually listing some of the things you have to keep track of and figure out the timing on the fly (as 'crap hits the fan') in the healer role vs. another role that only has to pay attention to it's rotation and positioning.

[Rilifane]

It's funny how people say healers aren't engaging...and then you get a post like this actually listing some of the things you have to keep track of and figure out the timing on the fly (as 'crap hits the fan') in the healer role vs. another role that only has to pay attention to it's rotation and positioning.

Oh please, don't tell me it's rocket science and super engaging for all eternity to read the tooltip of a level 50 skill and think "Hmm... it has a regen. So I should probably, maybe, potentially not... uh.. spam it when only the tank gets damage?".
A role isn't engaging because someone out there might be too busy netflixing to fulfill it at a basic level. You consider "not zoning out" as something healer-specific that makes it engaging? Really?

Edit: on second thought - I agree, not zoning out on healer is hard. I suppose we do have something resembling a skill ceiling and that's not falling asleep when the next scripted raidwide is another 2min away.

[ThorneDynasty]

It's funny how people say healers aren't engaging...and then you get a post like this actually listing some of the things you have to keep track of and figure out the timing on the fly (as 'crap hits the fan') in the healer role vs. another role that only has to pay attention to it's rotation and positioning.

Those are all very beginner mistakes though, coming back to the problem of how dull the role is the minute your feet leave the skill floor.

[Sebazy]

It's funny how people say healers aren't engaging...and then you get a post like this actually listing some of the things you have to keep track of and figure out the timing on the fly (as 'crap hits the fan') in the healer role vs. another role that only has to pay attention to it's rotation and positioning.

All of these things are basically the same point though, at least from another healer's perspective. Someone sits in the bad and eats damage/vuln stacks.

We shouldn't be needing to be praying for clown showers to get some work in, a clean run on something like Byregot is just mindnumbingly dull =(

And secondly, people eating the bad is overvalued anyway, in most casual content AoEs are pretty spaced apart, most of the time a regen+shield is absolutely plenty and exceptions where the hits are fast enough to be dangerous but not so fast that they are just going to die before much of anything lands are rare (Dead Ends Fa La and Azeyma's Fire quadrants into AoE are the 2 that spring to mind for me.

[Xtrasweettea]

It's funny how people say healers aren't engaging...and then you get a post like this actually listing some of the things you have to keep track of and figure out the timing on the fly (as 'crap hits the fan') in the healer role vs. another role that only has to pay attention to it's rotation and positioning.

After repetition, it's no longer really "on the fly." Unless you are doing a run with a team full of goobers, you will know what to prep for and what to look out for to prepare. Doesn't take that many times either.

You also get to know how much effort you will take to keep someone who is a Vulnerability collector alive before you just let them die. Sometimes Raise is just cheaper (besides, that person is probably doing less damage then you anyway).

On top of that, if you know a mechanic isn't going to be that much of a problem to you or the group in the long run, you can just take the hit. I think a good example is the final boss in Smileton. I on purposely step on the land-mines and set them off so the DPS don't have to fear keeping their uptime. That one vulnerable stack isn't worth of DPS loss from the melee disengaging. A simple Regen takes care of the damage.

[Liam_Harper]

It's funny how people say healers aren't engaging...and then you get a post like this actually listing some of the things you have to keep track of and figure out the timing on the fly (as 'crap hits the fan') in the healer role vs. another role that only has to pay attention to it's rotation and positioning.

This is when damage happens. Actual damage does happen, but quite rarely.

"Requires braincells from time to time if your group plays poorly" does not equal engaging and well designed. It means you get to be engaged 10% of your playtime and put to sleep the other 90%.

[IDontPetLalas]

People already do that dropping damage abilities instead of healing or raising people. Why just yesterday I saw an AST dropping fall malific while the raid needed heals and raises. They still were dropping fall malific until they died and finally the raid wiped.

I see so many tanks who don't use their mitigations. I'm sure that their rotations are too complex, let's just give them a single AOE, and a nice spammable single-target skill so they can concentrate their real job.

Sure, we could go that route. It would work, wouldn't it? probably wouldn't be fun for the tanks, but as long as they stay alive and keep aggro, they're doing their job.